Blinkit, Zepto offer delivery of goods in 10 minutes to grab market share Delivery race among grocery startups poses road safety risks
Indian grocery startups are luring tech-savvy customers with the promise of deliveries within 10 minutes, sparking a boom in "quick commerce", but heating up concerns about road safety as bike riders scramble to meet tight deadlines.
Competition is already intense in India's $600-billion grocery retailing industry, populated by the likes of Amazon , Walmart's Flipkart and billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance.
Now SoftBank-backed Blinkit and its rival Zepto are racing to hire staff and open stores in their bid to grab a share of the market by offering the convenience of delivery in 10 minutes, far lower than the hours, or days competitors take.
Their mission: pack groceries within a few minutes at so-called dark stores, or small warehouses in densely populated neighbourhood buildings, and send bike riders to nearby locations with about seven minutes to spare.
"It's a threat to the larger players," Ashwin Mehta, a lead IT sector analyst at India's Ambit Capital, told Reuters. "If people get used to 10 minutes, those companies offering 24-hour deliveries will be forced to reduce their timelines."
As activity grows, research firm RedSeer says India's quick commerce sector, worth $300 million last year, will swell 10-15 times to touch $5 billion by 2025.
Blinkit and Zepto, started by two 19-year-old dropouts from Stanford, have caught consumers' fancy, satisfying cravings for food and impulse shopping, as well as urgent needs for daily supplies.
The unbeatable convenience of rapid deliveries is evident in Europe and the US, where companies such as Turkey's Getir and Germany's Gorillas are expanding fast, but India's accident-prone roads make quick commerce a dangerous business.
"Ten minutes is very sharp," said a former road secretary, Vijay Chhibber. "If there was a (road safety) regulator, it would have said this can't be a company's unique selling point."
Last year, the World Bank said India had a death every four minutes on its roads. Crashes kill about 150,000 people each year.
Blinkit calls its service "indistinguishable from magic" and says it wants to become a $100-billion business.
Zepto has been valued at
$570 million and has set its eyes on becoming a
$20-billion company, already backed by investors such as USbased Glade Brook Capital.
The instant delivery market is a $50-billion opportunity, India's largest offline retailer, Reliance, said this month, when it invested in Dunzo, another Indian startup that runs a 19minute delivery service.